Carol Marbin Miller has six long, deep drawers filled with child death cases.

"And each one is as bad as the one before it," she said in a phone interview with Poynter.Since the mid-1990s, Marbin Miller has covered Florida's Department of Children & Families, first at the St. Petersburg Times (before it became the Tampa Bay Times, which Poynter owns.) Marbin Miller picked up that work in 2000 with the Miami Herald. She's now an investigative reporter.

On Sunday, March 16, the Herald began publishing the results of decades on that beat, with a project that took years, lawsuits and work from around the newsroom.

"Innocents Lost" tells the story of 477 children killed during the past six years by their parents, by their parents' significant others, by neglect, by drugs, by abuse. But it also tells the story of a system that each one of those families came into contact with before dying.

They tumbled into canals and drowned, baked in furnace-like cars, were soaked in corrosive chemicals, incinerated, beaten mercilessly, and bounced off walls and concrete pavement. One was jammed into a cooler posthumously; others were wrapped like a mummy to silence their cries, flattened by a truck, overdosed and starved. An infant boy was flung from a moving car on an interstate. A 2-year-old girl was killed by her mom’s pet python.

The children were not just casualties of bad parenting, but of a deliberate shift in Florida child welfare policy. DCF leaders made a decision, nearly 10 years ago, to reduce by as much as half the number of children taken into state care, adopting a philosophy known as family preservation. They also, simultaneously, slashed services, monitoring and protections for the increased number of children left with their violent, neglectful, mentally ill or drug-addicted parents.

The result: Many more children died.

Read the 477 narratives for yourself. Explore the database. Read about the safety plans that never worked. It takes time, and most people she knows, Marbin Miller said, have to stop for a while and come back to it.

In the meantime, here are four things that made this series work.

1. Years of reporting.

In 2011, the death of 10-year-old Nubia Barahona made headlines, and staff at the Herald started asking themselves how they could broaden the story and look at the numbers, said Casey Frank, the Herald's senior editor for investigations and enterprise, in a phone interview. The Herald requested five years worth of death reviews involving children from DCF. (As the reporting continued, that number stretched to six to include 2013.)

Getting those files took months and court cases, and the Herald didn't win them all. Once they had the files, they began sorting them, Frank said, looking for cases of families who, like Barahona's, had contact with DCF.

Then, last summer, a series of child deaths made the news. Again, all the families had prior contact with DCF. Reporting ramped up even more, other reporters were included and "Innocents Lost" started taking a clearer shape.

2. Clean data.

When Lazaro Gamio started working at the Herald as a data and multimedia producer, reporting for "Innocents Lost" had already begun, and there was a database where reporters put information on each child.

Gamio made things simpler, and more visual, using a Google spreadsheet and creating a rough way for reporters to visualize the data with tiles of the children's faces.

That was just supposed to be a reporting tool, Gamio said, but it became a design element and now it's also a way readers of "Innocents Lost" can learn about the cases.

Throughout, Gamio worked to keep the data itself cleaned up and uniform, making lots of lists for himself along the way. The result of all that work, he said, is you actually see the work.

"I think of it like a train," Gamio said. "And the engine room is the data base."

3. Careful writing.

"Innocents Lost" reports on the deaths of all those children using court documents, death reports, DCF files and interviews with family members. It also uses crisp, clean storytelling.

In the writing process, staff took an intentional approach to the writing, although there was some back and forth on the best way to tell the stories, Marbin Miller said.

The stories couldn't be sterile, she said, and they couldn't be overwrought death porn.

"Because of the subject matter, it’s not hard to find yourself overwriting," said Audra Burch, an enterprise reporter at the Herald who wrote many of the stories in the series, in an e-mail to Poynter. "We had to strike a balance between the facts and the storytelling, between the policy issues and the family voices, which required a certain clarity, restraint and discipline. Making sure we hit the high notes at just the right moment was a big part of the editing process."

4. Volume.

The time came, late last year, when Burch realized they were basically writing nearly 500 stories.

"Early on, we realized that much of the power of this project was in the sheer number of children's deaths," Burch said. "In some ways, that also made the responsibility even greater to humanize the project so that readers could clearly understand and appreciate the scale of the loss. We decided that each of those children deserved their own voice, their own story, all 477 of them."

Unlike her colleagues, Marbin Miller mostly wasn't shocked by the number of deaths as the Herald counted them. She knew they were high. But for 2008 and 2009, as the deaths for each of those years neared 100, she was surprised.

"And as we added new cases," she said, "they kept growing."

The response

In some ways, "Innocents Lost" has already made a difference.

"The truth is the response to the series began months ago as we requested the documents and showed that we were serious about doing a sweeping look at how DCF protects children, or in some cases, doesn't," Frank said.

"Already, the series has prompted discussions about reform, and a rewrite of several child welfare bills proposed in the Legislature," Burch agreed. "Journalistically, it opened up more possibilities in terms of combining investigative reporting, narrative writing and computer assisted reporting."

For Marbin Miller, though, the legislative response hasn't been enough.

"I get the sense that they want to talk about it because it looks good," she said. "But I don't get the sense that they have any intention to fix it."

In Florida's House, politicians think that $10 million in additional money is enough, she said, and they're being told by the people on the front lines that it's not even close.

There's a senate bill, Marbin Miller said, with money for 400 additional child protection investigators. One source told Marbin Miller, "imagine if you hired a whole bunch more ambulance drivers, but you have no place to take the people once you pick them up."

There's still no money for services, she said.

"Then you're right back where we've always been."

But "Innocents Lost" has already made a difference, Frank said. And much of that was preemptive.

"It's pretty clear to me that the governor would not be proposing certain things months ago if it were not for what the Herald was reporting and looking into."

Florida's government is trying to get out in front of the story, Frank said, "and in doing so, I think child welfare benefited and kids benefited."

In doing so, he said, he thinks DCF will be run better in the future.

"How much better remains to be seen."

If you run into a work of journalism that deserves this kind of close inspection and a place in The Poynter Excellence Project series, please email us at ExcellenceProject@poynter.org. If we use your suggestions, we’ll give you discounts on courses and webinars at Poynter News University.

What to read next

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Kristen Hare covers local news innovation for the Poynter Institute. Her work for Poynter has earned her a Mirror Award nomination. Hare, a graduate of the University of Missouri's School of Journalism, spent 5 years as the Sunday features writer and an assistant editor at the St. Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, and five years as a staff writer covering race, immigration, the census and aging at the St. Louis Beacon. She also spent two years with the Peace Corps in Guyana, South America. Hare and her family live outside Tampa.